Eight Lectures on Experimental Music by Alvin Lucier

Author:Alvin Lucier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2017-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

QUESTION

As an experimental musician, could you talk about your experience being an American before a European audience in the musical scene, versus that of being an American before an American audience in the American scene?

LA MONTE YOUNG

As an experimental musician? This is a question very dear to my heart because I think that America’s the most creative place in the world. It’s very difficult for anybody like me to have ever evolved out of Europe. Tradition is very strong in Europe. We’re very young. You know, because we’re young, because our forefathers came to this country and literally started over in the woods and made their own way, invented their own safety pin, we’re still part of that beginning. And we still have this sense of creativity such that we have to be able to think about it ourselves and do it ourselves. Additionally, because what tradition we had was from so many different places, we developed a sense that, OK, tradition was important, but you could break tradition. In fact, tradition is there for your own good, but you go to Europe and there is only tradition. It’s very difficult to get out of tradition. I’ll give you the simplest example. I grew up in L.A. In L.A., the supermarkets are open all night long every day of the week. You go to Europe, the stores close at five o’clock, and they are closed—it’s over, for the night. They open at eight in the morning, and they close on Saturday at 1:00 p.m., and they never are open on Sunday. Some stores have put up an incredible fight, and they are able to stay open until 8:00 p.m. It’s like that on every level.

Young composition students are really fighting the tradition, and in the ’60s Europeans thought it was literally inconceivable that a person like me wanted to live in sound environments all the time. They think that, you know, you do some music and then you don’t do music and you do something else, and vacations … it’s the way … you know, I haven’t had a vacation in maybe some ten years. It’s difficult being a composer who earns his living through his work to ever get caught up on money; it’s a very difficult situation. So, I don’t really have time for vacations. But I am so involved in what I’m doing and so happy, and I do get to go on tour, that I don’t ever really exactly want a vacation. Once I had a vacation; somebody insisted I take a vacation in 1985. I took this vacation, and what did we do? We practiced and I composed; I finally had a chance to compose. I am so busy running my life that chances to do creative things are rare. I have to really fight to get a commission, to get some time to get free to compose something, because a lot of my time goes into the production of the work. You produce records, you produce concerts, and you try to keep your work semiarchived.

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